Content Warning: Mentions of abuse, illness, mental illness, swearing, and low-key suicidality.
I was planning on having fun today, y’know. I was going to go to work, finish up that last bit of paperwork and be super productive, get back into my martial arts classes, then come home and read a nice book. Instead, I wound up having to take a personal day.
Because I’m the only office person and knew we’d be having a new client in that day, I went in before regular hours to prep some things and take some paperwork to work on at home. I stayed there at work until one of my coworkers showed up so I could quickly go over a couple things with her because she would need to step into the office for a few minutes to deal with the new client coming in that evening. Since I texted her only an hour before the shift, she was like, “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Is there an emergency?”
I told her no, it’s not an emergency, but I am dealing with a family crisis and financial struggles and desperately need a personal day. I spilled my guts to her and she tried so hard to leave me with positive vibes, bless her heart, but she was concerned and like, “Are you being paid enough?”
Which is complicated. It’s not that I’m being paid too little; it’s that I’m being charged too much.
I was hired at above minimum wage despite my lack of experience and have gotten a raise of fifty cents to a dollar each year since I started without needing to ask my boss, plus my boss gives me all the hours he can. He loves giving me more hours because that means less work for him, and he loves giving me raises because that means I’m taking on more responsibilities in the workplace which also means less work for him.
But living expenses in my area are so high that even though I’m working full-time hours at above minimum wage, I’m still unable to make ends meet. My rent alone, for what is the cheapest rental unit on the market, is 65% of my income and experts say your rent or mortgage payments should be no more than 30% of your income. Which is a pipe dream at this point.
The only reason I’ve been able to manage so far is because my mom has been helping me out financially and she may not be able to do that anymore because she and my stepfather might be separating or getting divorced.
Normally I wouldn’t talk about this kind of thing. My mom is a very private person and I want to respect her privacy, but there’s so much of it that is now having a direct impact on my life that I feel I’ve got to let it out somehow. And I’m just an anonymous blogger on the Internet and frankly have known so many women going through crap similar to this that I feel what I’m sharing doesn’t disclose any personal, identifying characteristics.
My mom has been having major marriage problems with my stepdad, pretty much ever since they married two years ago. He’s really mean with his words to her. Whenever he’s the least bit frustrated, he uses her as a scapegoat and basically says the most hurtful, cruel things that pop into his head, things that specifically target her insecurities, her past trauma, her financial difficulties, and her integrity, and then he expects her to just “get over it” and act like everything’s fine and when she’s like, “No, this isn’t fine, I’m not fine”, he just goes off on her again. This cycle has been repeating over and over with increasing frequency and intensity, and so she’s been staying at my place off and on for the past six months or so, trying to get the time and space she needs to heal.
Then almost three weeks ago, my stepdad told her to leave their marital home. He was mad because they were going to go out to dinner and he noticed she wasn’t wearing her ring. She hasn’t worn her ring in a while because it didn’t feel right to her after all he’s said to her and when he asked about the ring, she told him she didn’t feel comfortable wearing it and he responded by telling her “Fine, then I’m not taking you to dinner. Take your things and go… for a week.”
I think it’s worth mentioning that one of the days in this “week” was their anniversary. And he still chose to do that. He also chose to do that knowing that she’d only just started a new job after being laid off due to covid over a year ago, knowing that she was not financially secure without him, knowing that she was working with a permanent injury (but not permanent enough to qualify for disability, because Canada’s great lol), and knowing she would now have two hours of commute added to her work day because my place is further from her work than their place is.
Shortly after staying with me again, she wound up being quite sick and I insisted she continue to stay with me until she was better, as I didn’t think she would recover if she was around my stepdad, so I was taking care of her before and after my shifts at work, picking up medicine for her, booking covid tests for us both (negative), and booking doctor’s appointments for her. Turns out that it is a particularly nasty sinus infection, probably the worst one I’ve seen her have. She used to get sinus infections a lot when I was in high school because we had a lot of chain-smoking neighbours in the apartment complexes we lived in, but this infection was so bad that she didn’t recognize it as being a sinus infection; we only found out after the doctor tested her.
The doctor prescribed some powerful antibiotics, which have been working their magic, so my mom is back at work for the first time since getting sick. Since I’m home from work and my mom is at work, this is the first time in a while that I’ve felt like I’ve had any privacy to be able to write. And, god, I’ve needed to write. As I type this out, I feel all this poison being drawn out of me. All this crap that has been pent up for weeks and months is finally able to be processed and released.
All of this has been so draining, traumatic, and terrifying for me.
Firstly, I can wind up losing my place. The only way I’m even able to have my own place is because my mom is helping me financially. The reason she’s able to help me with payments is because she’s living with my stepfather, who has been paying for her living expenses because, duh, she’s his spouse and they live together.
But if they separate or divorce, that changes.
If my mom is no longer living with him, these are our options: we live in our own places, or we live together. At this point in time, I make more money than my mom does, so if I need her help to pay my expenses as it is, how on earth could we each have our own place when rental housing is so expensive? Unless some kind of miracle happens, us each having our own place is virtually impossible, as much as we each need our own space.
Which leaves us with moving in together, which is a huge lifestyle change for us both. I’ve been living on my own for two years now. I have my own furniture, my own schedule, my own habits, and, as an introvert, I very much enjoy living alone. Beyond being introverted, I have some serious mental health problems that make it incredibly draining for me to share my living space with someone. Having anxiety makes it difficult enough just to work with people for my 8-hour shift, but having to come home to yet another person after working with people all day is one of the most depressing things I can imagine for my life.
Plus, we’ll have to shell out $500 for breaking my lease, then try to find another place to live when rent is so frickin’ expensive and most places don’t allow pets, then pay for security and pet deposits and likely pay for an extra month to hold the place we’d be moving into, then hire movers or move everything ourselves, all within the time limit imposed on us by the prenuptial agreement my mom and stepdad signed.
My mom will likely have to sell or give away her antique furniture because it takes up a lot of space and is very difficult to move. Which sucks because it’s one-of-a-kind furniture made in the 1920s with details that you just don’t see on furniture anymore. We picked it out together at the antique store after we left my abusive father, so it’s special. We’ve even been talking about refinishing it.
I’ve been contemplating selling some of my own furniture, which I really don’t want to do because I searched for months to find this exact set of furniture and I saved for months to pay for it and was so proud when I came up with the money. Though my mom is adamant on me not selling my furniture, but I feel bad seeing her have to contemplate selling her own.
This feels like the death of my dreams. When my mom and stepdad got engaged, I was so excited because I thought that finally, someone would treat my mom right and take care of her like she deserves. My father, being the abusive piece of garbage that he is, obviously didn’t take care of me or my mom, so the thought of her being married to a good man who had his life together, who could provide for her financially after a decade of her struggling to provide for the two of us– that gave me a sense of peace.
And now that peace is gone because I can’t trust him to take care of her. He’s been so verbally abusive and controlling towards her that she’s been starting to have health issues and I’m scared that if she stays with him, her health will fail. The last time she been this sick was when she was still with my father. And when she was with my father, the stress made her so sick her kidneys started to fail and she wound up in the hospital. Another time, she wound up with severe psoriasis where her skin came off in sheets. And then when I was a teenager and we were in the process of leaving my father, she had a breast cancer scare and the breast cyst the surgeon removed was strange– they didn’t classify it as cancerous, but couldn’t classify it as benign either. Sometimes I wonder if we’d stayed any longer, if that cyst would’ve progressed to full-blown breast cancer. And frankly, most the women I’ve met who’ve had breast cancer have had difficult marriages. Research has established a link between cancer and stress. And I’m so afraid that if this continues and she stays with my stepdad, this is what will happen.
And you know, I was enjoying being part of a family again. I love my stepdad, my stepsister, their sweet, fluffy cat, and their extended family too. It was nice having people to celebrate special occasions like Christmas and Thanksgiving with, and nice going to family gatherings with people I actually like and have things in common with. Obviously this all changes if they separate or divorce, so there’s a very real sense of grief for me.
And I love my stepdad. It really hurts to see someone I love treat someone else I love so horribly. It hurts to have to look at the behaviour of someone I love and say “That is abusive behaviour” and pull out my abuse and trauma books, pull out my highlighters and go “Yep, that’s verbal abuse. Yep, that’s emotional abuse. Yep, that’s financial abuse”. But it is what it is and I must call it as it is.
But beyond the grief, I’m just so angry at the injustice of it all. I’m so sick of shitty men and shitty systems and shitty politicians screwing us over.
I’m just so angry because my stepdad’s behaviour is affecting everyone except him:
-My mom is absolutely heartbroken, her health is falling to pieces, she’s having to miss work, she’s too emotionally broken to visit friends and family, she has no financial security, she’s paying hundreds of dollars for counselling to try and save a marriage that might not even be salvageable, and her dreams are dead as she’s having to consider divorcing and starting over at 60 years old.
-My grandparents aren’t getting the help they need from my mom because she’s a wreck from crap my stepdad’s said and done, and my aunt, who’s also caring for my dying uncle, is having to step in and help. My aunts and uncles in general are feeling kinda neglected because my mom hasn’t talked to them in ages because she’s a wreck.
-I’m a wreck because after I get off work, I’m putting on my therapist hat to help my mom deal with this for 2 to 4 hours a night, which is why I’m so wrecked that I couldn’t even make it in today. So now I’m missing work and losing pay because of this too. And as much fulfillment as I gain from helping others through counselling (which is why I’m in school), doing that for hours after completing a full 8-hour shift again and again has mentally broken me.
-My coworkers are having to cover for me and help with work they’re not even trained to do. My boss is stressed because I’m not getting done everything I need to get done, which means he has to do it or his business suffers.
Like, seriously, his behaviour is affecting everyone. Even our cats are having a rough time. My cat enjoys having my mom here, but is going to wind up grieving her loss if my mom winds up not staying with me anymore, and my stepdad’s cat is all sad because my mom is almost never there and their cat sleeps on my mom’s pillow because she misses her. I feel so bad for that little cat because she has no idea what’s going on or why my mom isn’t there.
I just want to scream at him and tell him to think about how everyone is having to pay the price for his actions. And it hardly affects him at all because he’s wealthy. If they separate or divorce, he doesn’t have to start looking for a new place to live because he owns his house– it’s got his name on it, him and his late first wife paid it off decades ago, and it’s protected by that iron-clad prenup– but my mom and I get completely uprooted because we don’t have the money to have our own homes.
And it’s a bummer because I really wanted to make my apartment home. I bought furniture for this apartment. I hung up pictures. I was going to paint it and was picking out colours. It’s only minutes from work and I could even walk to university if I wanted. And now I might lose it, because of shitty men screwing me and my mom over, shitty systems that say “Sorry, you’re not poor enough for us to help you” and “Sorry, you’re not disabled enough for us to help you”, and shitty politicians who promise to lower the cost of rent then never do.
And on top of this, I’ve got my own shit to deal with. Financial difficulties, being diagnosed with a chronic illness, starting a new medication and adjusting the dosage of my old medication, my cat being diagnosed with early kidney disease, my grandmother having dementia, applying for rental assistance that will likely be rejected, applying to return to school and finish my degree, applying for scholarships and bursaries, researching and gathering evidence for the letter I’m wanting to send to every politician in the area to get their butts into gear and actually get them to deliver on their promises of lowering housing costs, being told that whatever I write probably won’t get them to do anything about it anyway, shitty friends who don’t bother to check up on me ever or update me on how their lives are going, working at a small business in a pandemic where I work with kids (who carry disease like rats so combined with how stressed I am, I’m always catching some kind of sickness) in a neighbourhood with no disposable income to support our business, and just low-key wishing I didn’t exist.
And tomorrow, I’ll need to go back to work with a positive attitude and a smile on my face and I don’t even know if I’ll be able to do that. I sure wasn’t able to today.
After talking to her, my coworker said, “I know it seems bad, but you never know how things will turn out. Maybe they’ll be able to fix their marriage. Or maybe it’ll be a blessing in disguise. And I can’t see you losing your home. Because you’re a strong, independent woman. And I know you believe in God, and I don’t think He’ll let you lose your home.” And just a couple days ago, my mom was saying how I work so hard and how my life is coming together now that I’ve moved so close to work and got my diagnosis and my new medication, and how God was going to bless me, but honestly, I’m not feeling very blessed right now.
The Intersection of Everything 